Bush's Budget to Call for Nuclear Partnership With Russia

WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 - The Bush administration will propose in its budget on Monday the creation of an atomic energy partnership with Russia, offering countries a supply of fuel for their reactors under restrictions intended to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons, according to administration officials.

Under the proposal, the United States and Russia would provide reactor fuel to other countries and take back the spent fuel afterward to prevent its use in weaponry. President Bush called for a similar plan two years ago, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has recommended an international fuel system in which it would control custody of nuclear fuel.

Mr. Bush's new budget includes about $250 million to continue research on two new technologies that are intended to significantly reduce the amount of nuclear waste requiring long-term disposal.

But one senior official called those techniques "a long way away," and Mr. Bush's own concerns about the plan, some officials say, explained why he did not include it in his State of the Union address on Tuesday.

The timing is critical, because Russia is already negotiating with Iran on a deal to provide it with reactor fuel that -- if the Iranians consent -- could become a model for part of the new program, keeping the fuel technology out of the hands of countries that do not already have nuclear weapons.

Elements of the plan have been reported in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

In addition to curbing the spread of nuclear weapons, the administration sees the plan as a way to promote the use of nuclear power at home by solving problems with the disposal of radioactive waste. The energy secretary is supposed to tell Congress next year whether a second dump, beyond the Yucca Mountain site near Las Vegas, will be needed. But it is not clear when even the Yucca site can be opened.

The new plan relies on an experimental "fast" reactor that has been tried in France and Japan and found to be prone to catching fire and not cost-effective.

The program would also require changes in American law to allow the dumping of foreign-generated waste at Yucca, and it would face fierce domestic opposition because it would create a fuel processing industry that, because it converts solid waste into liquids that could leak, would be potentially more polluting than the current industry.

Frank von Hippel, a physicist at Princeton and a skeptic about the proposed technology, said the United States would probably have to volunteer to keep the unusable end-product wastes to induce countries to participate. "If they get the high-level waste back, what do they gain?" he said.

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People who have been briefed on the plan say it will be included in the Energy Department's budget, expanding a year-old Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative at Los Alamos National Laboratory, for which $79.2 million was appropriated. In addition, last year Congress gave the Energy Department $50 million to find a site for storing nuclear waste and building a reprocessing factory, but the department does not appear to have begun significant work on that.

The proposal would take years to bear fruit, and some experts doubt that it is workable. But like the idea for hydrogen cars, it fits the Bush administration's preference for long-term, high-technology approaches to major energy problems.

It would once again get the United States into the business of nuclear reprocessing, a technology it dropped during the Ford administration. One expert said an advantage of having Russia as a partner, and possibly signing up France later, was that those two countries already had conventional reprocessing industries, while the new American system would be decades in the future.

In the conventional system, used commercially in this country in the late 1960's and early 70's, fuel was taken out of a reactor and dissolved in acid to separate usable material, leaving behind a very large residue that will be radioactive for a very long time.

In the new version, the tank would have two giant electrodes, which would sort the contents into material that could be reused, some of it with radioactive lifetimes measured in millenniums, and material that could not be reused, most of which would lose its radioactivity in a few hundred years.

The volume of waste requiring long-term disposal would be reduced by 99 percent, according to advocates. But part of the volume reduction includes building a new class of reactors, not commercially demonstrated, that could use the most common form of uranium, called uranium-238, as fuel. At present uranium-238 is used in making plutonium, which is used as fuel.

A Congressional aide who specializes in the field said he was anticipating a request for an "industrial-scale demonstration" of the separation technology.

Scientists differ about whether fuel made through the new separation system would increase the risk of material being diverted for nuclear weapons.